WASHINGTON — Lest you think Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is going soft after a tough year in Congress, two stories today remind that the guy once described as someone who would kneecap the opposition remains in top form.
First, The New York Times reports that notwithstanding Reid’s appearance alongside Bush at today’s energy bill signing […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — This is how it ends. The long debate over the Iraq war that consumed so much of the new Democratic-run Congress this year, especially in the Senate where Nevada’s Harry Reid is the majority leader, headed tonight toward its quiet conclusion.
Fifty senators voted at about 8:30 p.m. EST for a non-binding “sense of […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — The coal plants proposed for White Pine County dodged a bullet Monday.
A provision sought by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to tighten air quality regulations in nearby Great Basin National Park was excluded from a final year-end bill going through Congress. Instead, Congress called for a study of the issue.
But Reid made his […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON— It’s not officially dead, but Yucca Mountain is facing a devastating funding cut in the new spending bill out this morning — a significant blow that the project director has said could cause him to miss the project’s crucial 2008 deadline.
Earlier this year I wrote about how we would know when the nuclear waste […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — Don’t go looking for a chapter on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in fellow Sen. Trent Lott’s new book.
Lott was holding court in the halls outside the Senate earlier this week opining on the current gridlock that has overtaken Congress, when he went on a riff about the book he plans to write […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — Fully one year after the Bush administration’s Justice Department fired Nevada’s Daniel Bogden in an unprecedented purge of U.S. Attorneys nationwide – leading to the fall of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — the Senate has confirmed the state’s new top federal prosecutor.
Gregory A. Brower, a former Republican assemblyman in Nevada and one-time official […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — Dan Geary flipped the TV on at 6 a.m. Thursday morning, glued to C-SPAN2.
He pulled his two teenage daughters into the room to watch history in the making, as he put it, before sending them off to high school.
For environmentalists, it was a day they had been waiting for: Congress was poised to […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — In case you missed it, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wasn’t the only one complaining last week about the difficulty of working with the Bush administration.
The feeling, apparently, is mutual.
Vice President Cheney was asked during an interview with reporters from Politico how it has been working with Reid this year. “Difficult,” the […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — If ever there was a time for a Senate filibuster, MoveOn.org says, this would be it.
Today the liberal anti-war group plans to deliver petitions signed by more than 15,000 vets and families to the offices of the Democratic senators running for president (Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Obama) urging them to block any Senate vote […]

[Read more →]

WASHINGTON — The Washington Post today reports on Sen. John Ensign leading his party’s efforts to take a second look at this week’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.
Ensign will introduce legislation next week to form a congressional commission to investigate the report “amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that […]

[Read more →]